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A college-age neighbor walked through our front door, took one look at the hallway and said, “Oh, wow, you all are living in a crack house now?”

Yes, we have crack-house woodwork at the moment. It is in that ugly, mottled, can’t-turn-back stage between no paint and a lot of tedious finish work to make it beautiful enough to varnish.

We have been here before, and we hate it. The elbow grease needed to go over all the baseboards and around all the doorways and up the railing is almost more daunting than the thought of removing the paint in the first place.

And it took us 21 years to build up the courage to take the first step to remove paint in the most heavily traveled space in our 143-year-old house. Until last month, it was the last remaining “room” in the house that we hadn’t touched.

The wallpaper was probably 70 years old, the carpet on the staircase is 1970s gold shag (purposely left in place to protect the staircase during years of renovation), and the most ornate woodwork in the house was covered by layers of paint.

We’ve learned that removing paint is not for the faint of heart or sensitive of smell. We also have learned — from others — that it can be dangerous.

A former neighbor used a heat gun to remove paint from her entryway and poisoned herself with lead by unwittingly inhaling the fumes while standing over the gun to scrape. Beware: Paint made before 1978 contains lead.

Another neighbor used a torch to burn off old paint and accidentally set his house on fire. The same neighbor’s removal of paint from exterior brick walls allowed so much moisture into old mortar between soft bricks that part of a wall collapsed. (The house is still standing and is lovely.)

Our first experience in stripping paint/varnish involved a table so covered in dark, cracked, congealed varnish that it was virtually black — except where a newspaper page from the 1940s had embedded itself in the varnish.

We hauled it to the backyard and went over it with Zip-Strip, which comes in a yellow and black can that looks like something your grandpa would have used and is the sort of chemical that lets you know it’s really strong stuff by basically punching you in the nose.

The finished table, by the way, is gorgeous and has been our dinner table for 20 years.

For those who are interested in more detail about paint strippers and the chemicals in them, you’ll find a report by This Old House magazine helpful; visit www.thisold house.com/toh/ article/0,,1173854,00.html.

For the hallway, we tried three types of stripper. The first was Klean-Strip Premium Sprayable Stripper, which advertises itself as the fastest (“works in less than 15 minutes”) and strongest (“removes multiple layers of any finish”) as well as a liquid (“convenient spray-on application covers quickly”).

The second was Klean-Strip KS-3 Premium Stripper, which seems to be the same chemicals but in a paste.

The third was Citristrip, which is advertised as a “safer” paint-and-varnish stripping gel. It was also the slowest. It stripped the paint and is low-odor, as advertised, but seemed best for flat surfaces. It didn’t stay put long enough on vertical surfaces to do the job well.

The Klean-Strip paste removed paint well but not as quickly.

With the liquid, which was applied with the spray bottle provided with the stripper, we could spray a 3-foot-wide section of baseboard, let it soak in and loosen paint while spraying another section, then strip the first section while the second was soaking.

The directions with all three strippers recommend using plastic scrapers, but we found they didn’t work as well as a metal scraper, so we took care with the sharper edge to avoid digging into the wood.

We taped off spindles on which we’re leaving paint, and we used dropcloths liberally to protect the wood floor.

The liquid didn’t have a strong odor, but we still wore a respirator to protect against fumes and possible lead contamination. We also wore long sleeves, long pants and boots to protect against overspray. We wore safety glasses and rubber gloves, too.

Yet to be applied to the wood is the Klean-Strip Paint Stripper After Wash, which is designed to remove small paint flecks and residue. We’ll protect ourselves with the same safety equipment and use “stripping pads,” which look like kitchen pot scrubbers, to help the chemical do its work.

In the meantime, we’re going for a chic crack-house look.

Alan D. Miller is a Dispatch managing editor who writes about old-house renovation and historic preservation.